Content uploaded by David Tan
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by David Tan on Apr 04, 2018
Content may be subject to copyright.
Applying Systems Thinking to Urban Health and Wellbeing
SCHEMA Case Studies
3
SCHEMA Case Studies
Kuala Lumpur • 2018
4
Acknowledgements
The SCHEMA Project is funded by a Newton-Ungku Omar
Institutional Links grant. The lead project partners are United Nations
University International Institute for Global Health and Cardi
University Sustainable Places Research Institute. LESTARI Universiti
Kebangsaan Malaysia and the Penang Institute are associate partners.
We thank all the case study authors for their contributions. We also
acknowledge Dr. Barry Newell’s and Dr. Katrina Proust’s feedback
and insights. We thank Ms. Leong Yen Yen for proofreading the text
and Mr. John Reid for valuable design insights.
SCHEMA Case Studies
Editors David Tan and Jose Siri
Designer David Tan
Publisher United Nations University,
International Institute for Global Health,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 2016
ISBN 978-92-808-8108-0
© 2018 Copyright resides with the photographers and writers
Further information
Email iigh-info@unu.edu
Web
SCHEMA Sponsors
SCHEMA Partners
https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/sustainable-places/
research/projects/systems-thinking-and-place-based-
methods-for-healthier-malaysian-cities-schema
5
Table of Contents
4 The SCHEMA Project
6 Complexity in Urban Health
8 A Primer on Feedback Loops
10 Causal Loop Models as a Tool
11 Systems in Places
12 School Canteens and Student Nutrition
16 Healthy Food Choices and Diabetes
20 Greening Buerworth: Rejuvenating Spaces
24 Holding onto a Mission for Conservation and
Education
28 Challenging Land Use Paradigms in a University
Context
32 Sustainable River Management: The Pinang River
36 Bike Sharing for Multi-Modal Transit
SCHEMA
Case studies
6
The SCHEMA project, also known as “Systems Thinking and
Place-Based Methods for Healthier Malaysian Cities,” seeks
to explore linkages between important urban challenges
and health, provide tools for navigating complexity, and
establish new partnerships to motivate beer decisions for
healthier urban environments.
The project advocates a holistic, systems-based approach
to urban health and provides tools suited to such an eort.
Systems thinking helps trace the feedback loops that shape
our environment and choices. With an awareness of these
interactions, we can see why expanding road capacity
cannot resolve trac congestion over the long term, or why
obesity has posed such challenges to governments at all
scales, or why a multitude of other policy choices have gone
astray. It teaches us to think beyond linear solutions and to
look for leverage points in a larger system of relationships.
Systems approaches also facilitate communication between
disciplines and between experts and non-experts by
providing a simple, visual language for explaining our
understanding of cause-and-eect linkages.
Place-based methods are the other major tool in the
SCHEMA arsenal. Every place—a city, a neighbourhood, a
social gathering, a park, or a WhatsApp group—is unique.
Context maers in understanding the workings of urban
systems, and thus the challenges and lessons inherent in each
place. For this reason, otherwise successful urban health
THE SCHEMA PROJECT
DAVID TAN
SCHEMA
Case studies
7
interventions often fail when scaled up or implemented
in new places. It is not enough to know that something
worked—to draw the right lessons and translate solutions
into new contexts, we must understand why it worked and
the interactions and feedbacks that made success possible.
Place-based methods help us recognise and navigate the
distinctiveness of each place.
SCHEMA has promoted cross-cuing action and research
and disseminated systems- and place-based tools through
a diversity of channels, including through workshops,
academic exchanges, and journal articles. The SCHEMA
Case Study Series is part of that endeavour. It explores
themes central to urban health that include land use, food
consumption, transport, and community empowerment.
Each story is told using causal loop diagrams, the language
of systems thinking. These are stories you are already
familiar with, stories you see and experience in your daily
lives, retold in ways that bring to light the linkages and
feedback loops that lie at the root of the outcomes we see.
The case studies come from a variety of contexts and scales.
Some are at the national level, painted in broad strokes;
others are specic to a particular place, a university or a
river, for example; all hold valuable lessons for other places
and times. As you explore these stories, we invite you to see
how we think about urban health. In the process, we hope
you will discover new insights that inspire you to rethink
how cities work and reimagine the environment you want
to live in.
"The SCHEMA workshop was a very engaging platform for the
different elds of expertise to share their thoughts and inputs.
It allowed amalgamation of different views and knowledge from
the respective participants for a better understanding and nally
conceptualising a common framework to achieve the workshop
goals and objectives. It should denitely be continued in the future."
- Dr. Zeeda Fatimah Mohammad, SCHEMA alumni
SCHEMA
Case studies
8
COMPLEXITY IN URBAN
HEALTH
JOSE SIRI
In 1948, the World Health Organisation dened health as
“a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being
and not merely the absence of disease or inrmity.” This
lofty goal expresses a recognition of the complex nature of
the determinants of health. And yet all too often, solutions
to health challenges are narrowly dened in terms of the
health sector. But health cannot be achieved through medical
care alone. Certainly, our lifestyles and living environments
have a tremendous impact on both wellbeing and disease.
Unravelling the complex interactions of all these factors is
a maer of survival, both in the narrow terms of individual
human lives and with respect to the health of the planetary
environment on which our civilisation depends.
The habitats where we live are increasingly urban—in
Malaysia, they now account for 75% of the population. To
improve the health of Malaysians—and urban dwellers all
over the world—we must therefore look to the way cities
are planned, built, and run. Indeed, urban health extends
far beyond the clinic doors. It is the air quality in our homes,
schools, and workplaces. It is the interaction of urban heat
islands with building design, which aects our vulnerability
to heatwaves and the quality of our sleep. It is the sidewalks
and parks that encourage us to get outdoors, be physically
active, and interact with our neighbours and communities—
or the lack of such amenities. It is time spent working and
commuting, which in turn inuences stress levels, food
choices, physical activity, and family interactions. It is the
multitude of ways in which gender, ethnicity, and socio-
economic status aect access to municipal services and
public spaces.
This picture, just a glimpse of the countless facets of urban
health, gives us a sense of its complexity. Faced with a
complex problem, it is human nature to break it down into
smaller parts, and we have replicated this process at all scales.
To manage urban complexity, we divide responsibilities
among various disciplines, sectors, and agencies. Yet our
organisational boundaries and the real-world workings of
complex systems often fail to align. Moreover, informational
and management silos, once formed, tend to be self-
perpetuating, as specialists develop their own professional
languages, codes of conduct, communication channels, and
worldviews. Under these circumstances we are bound to
miss causal links, overlook both risks and opportunities,
and fail to recognise the cross-sectoral consequences of our
decisions. Specialisation is an important element of both
science and governance—for urban health no less than
in other areas. Yet developing holistic understanding is
equally critical, and far less recognised. Transdisciplinary
research—research that crosses disciplines and the research-
practitioner divide—and cross-sectoral collaboration are
important and necessary for improved decision-making.
SCHEMA
Case studies
9
When dealing with complexity, we also tend to simplify.
Indeed, our dominant paradigms for science and policy
are linear, based on simple cause-and-eect—we seek to
evaluate the eect of X on Y, controlling for all possible
confounders, and we search for silver-bullet policy solutions.
On an individual level, we construct our mental models of
the world based on processes that are easily observable,
often failing to recognise outcomes that develop over long
timeframes or at a distance. Yet most urban challenges involve
dozens of complex processes and relationships, intersecting
over varying timeframes in intricately interlinked chains of
feedback loops. These are modulated by the continuous, often
conicting, simultaneous actions of legions of stakeholders
with dierent motivations, perceptions and power. Indeed,
decisions that shape the urban environment are often driven
by economic, institutional, and political considerations,
which may or may not align with health. Individual and
societal choices thus shape the urban environment, which
in turn shapes those continuing choices. It is impossible to
make a single change in an urban system—pulling one lever
sets many things in motion, and it is dicult to see where,
across place and time, the ripples end. Is it any wonder that
we are so often surprised by the unintended consequences
of our actions?
Yet, there is room for real optimism, as we consider our
relationship with the city. There is no question that the
human mind is, in some contexts, admirably adapted
for dealing with complexity. For example, each of us
manages a startling mental web of relationships and
dependencies among our friends, families, colleagues and
acquaintances. More formally, systems science, applied to
real-world problems of organisational eciency, politics,
environmental management, and—increasingly—health,
has led to real successes. The SCHEMA Case Study Series
seeks to show how simple models can lead to a greater
consciousness of the impacts of complexity, and therefore
to more eective approaches to urban challenges for health
and sustainability.
“The denitive factors in determining whether someone is in good
health extend signicantly beyond access to care and include the
conditions in their life and the conditions of their neighborhoods
and communities.”
-John Auerbach, United States Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, at Build Healthy Places Network, 2015.
SCHEMA
Case studies
10
These arrows describe simple cause-and-eect relationships
between two variables. However, system behaviour is often
driven by feedback loops, i.e., by chains of relationships
that feed back to aect the original variable. Thus, as the
restaurant’s customers recommend it to their friends, the
restaurant gains customers, who then tell yet more friends.
This forms a reinforcing loop.
This loop could also work the other way: if the restaurant
loses customers for one reason or another, fewer people
will hear about it through word of mouth, and fewer new
customers will show up, creating a downward spiral.
Assuming, though, that the restaurant is gaining customers
and recommendations, can this continue indenitely?
Feedback relationships are a key feature of complex systems.
In causal loop diagrams, they are represented as feedback
loops. Consider the example of a restaurant: to aract
customers, the manager might hire an interior designer to
improve the ambience. The aractiveness of the ambience
and the number of customers are positively related: as
ambience increases, so does the number of customers, and
as ambience decreases, the number of customers decreases
too. This is represented by an arrow with positive polarity.
Ambience is not the only factor determining customer
trac. The price of food is also important, but it acts in the
opposite direction, i.e., it is negatively related to the number
of customers. That is, the higher the price of food, the fewer
customers, and the lower the price, the more customers.
This kind of relationship is represented by an arrow with
negative polarity.
A PRIMER ON FEEDBACK
LOOPS
DAVID TAN
Figure 1: Positive relationship between aractiveness of restaurant
ambience and number of customers.
Figure 2: Negative relationship between price and number of
customers.
Figure 3: Reinforcing feedback loop showing the relationship
between number of customers and number of recommendations.
SCHEMA
Case studies
11
equilibirum. This is known as goal-seeking behaviour -
though it should not be taken to imply a “desired” state for
the system.
Feedback loops drive system behaviour and can interact
with each other and with interventions in surprising and
unexpected ways. Casual loop diagrams can help us trace
these paerns and identify leverage points for system
change.
Unfortunately for the restaurant, the answer is no. In the real
world, reinforcing loops are always limited by other factors.
In this case, one limit might be waiting time. As the number
of customers increases, so does the waiting time for a table.
Frustrated customers leave, thus reducing the waiting time
for the remaining customers. We can represent this with a
balancing loop.
Reinforcing loops result in exponential growth or exponential
decay – growing or declining at ever-faster rates. Balancing
loops, on the other hand, tend to converge toward a specic
Figure 4: Exponential growth and collapse patterns observed in
reinforcing loops.
Figure 6: Goal-seeking growth and decay paerns observed in
balancing loops.
Figure 5: Balancing feedback loop showing the relationship
between number of customers and waiting time. Figure 7: Combined system integrating the relationships shown
in Figures 1-4. Eorts to draw in customers by improving the
aractiveness of ambience and reducing prices can achieve success
by increasing the number of customers and recommendations, but
are limited by customer waiting time. Further gains will require—
for example, an increase the number of tables and/or sta.
SCHEMA
Case studies
12
CAUSAL LOOP MODELS
AS A TOOL
JOSE SIRI
with dening the boundaries of causal systems, and with
drawing policy recommendations from such work. All
those involved gained a beer understanding of the origins
and persistence of the urban challenges described here.
Third, the collaborative construction of causal loop
models in this Case Study Series is intended to break
silos and improve communication. Through the extended
communication over weeks or even months of rening
the causal models presented here, authors learned to
understand one another’s ways of thinking and modes of
expression, familiarised each other with disciplinary jargon,
and created and strengthened personal bonds. We expect
that the collaborative relationships developed here will lead
to productive cross-sectoral collaboration that continues
beyond the formal end of the SCHEMA project. Indeed, this
function is a critical goal of the SCHEMA project, which is
funded by an Institutional Links grant.
We present this SCHEMA Case Study Series, then, as one
eective model for transdisciplinary engagement in service
of sustainable, healthy, urban development.
A central assertion of the SCHEMA approach is that
complex problems can often be addressed using simple
models in transdisciplinary engagement. Indeed, simple
models can be more powerful than highly complex ones,
insofar as they identify critical feedback relationships and
are mutually understandable by stakeholders operating at
dierent places in a causal system. In such contexts, they
can lead to surprising insights, beer communication, and
more eective action.
In the SCHEMA Case Study Series, causal loop models
serve three distinct but interrelated functions. First, they are
explanatory; each case study reframes an urban challenge
to health and/or sustainability in terms of the feedback
relationships that underlie outcomes. The goal is not to
generate an estimate of eect sizes or denitively identify
policy solutions—though these aims are indeed amenable
to more detailed research projects. Rather, the studies here
were chosen to represent a diverse set of problems of varying
scales and scopes, and to show how understanding of
simple feedbacks can generate understanding and suggest
new potential actions.
Second, the studies are exercises in capacity-building. Each
Case Study was developed via iterative communication
between UNU-IIGH researchers and SCHEMA partners.
During this process of mutual learning, partners gained
experience with conceptualising, delimiting and describing
feedback relationships of progressively greater complexity,
SCHEMA
Case studies
13
SYSTEMS IN PLACES
YI GONG
moderating social, economic and environmental processes.
Place-based analysis highlights how local processes shape
and are shaped by processes operating at scales from micro
to meso to macro. Human-environment interactions are
strongly context-sensitive, so we must pay aention to the
inuence that places have on the operation of feedback
loops in causal systems. Systems operating according to the
same sets of causal inuences can have drastically dierent
outcomes, depending on a variety of local contextual factors.
These include the relative levels of state variables, the relative
strength of linking processes, power relationships among
stakeholders, socio-cultural norms, and other factors.
Place is an organising concept that enables beer integration
of sub-systems for directed solutions in sustainable
development. Adding place to systems thinking is critical to
achieving the SDGs in Malaysia, as in other unique contexts.
Understanding the operation of systems in place improves
our comprehension of these systems, and thus our ability
to translate theories and knowledge across contexts. This is
especially important given that most theory and knowledge
are based on case studies from Western countries.
Case studies are a particularly useful tool for understanding
place—by their nature, they are snapshots of a particular
context. As such, they oer insights into the similarities and
dierences in the operation of systems across space and
time. Each case study in the following section illustrates and
emphasize the role of place in systems thinking.
Systems thinking allows us to see and deal with the feedback
relationships that drive complex systems. Using input from
actors and observers, problems and key solutions are dened
through chains of linked variables that form reinforcing or
balancing feedback loops. But, thinking in systems is only
one part of solutions for sustainable development—we also
need to think in place.
The places we live in have profound eects on our health and
behaviour, and on sustainable development itself. Scholars
have examined how dierent aspects of place, including
cultural, social, economic, and environmental contexts aect
a multitude of outcomes. In daily life, place often appears to
be a stationary stage on which existence plays out; yet, over
time, these seemingly static places respond to our inuences,
revealing their dynamic nature. In research, place may be
thought of just as a site of data collection; yet these sites
aect all aspects of our health and wellbeing. Moreover,
each place is unique. The interactions and connections that
bind us to places are often diverse, complex, and non-linear.
They comprise mutually reinforcing relationships between
us as individuals, with our communities, and with the
physical aspects of our surroundings.
It is true that many ecological threats seem placeless. For
example, climate change is driven by processes operating
at a macro (i.e., planetary) scale. Nevertheless, the root of
this global threat exists in behaviours and drivers at micro
and local levels. Local context plays a fundamental role in
SCHEMA
Case studies
14
Local Context
In recent years, Malaysia has topped Southeast Asia in
obesity and overweight rates. Nearly half of all Malaysian
adults are now overweight, and this number continues to
rise. In the Malaysian public school system, food provision
is contracted out to local operators. Despite eorts to ensure
high food quality, school canteen food in Malaysia is often
of low nutritional value. This case study explores the
underlying mechanisms in this situation.
Addressing the Problem
Two Malaysian ministries are responsible for regulating
Overview
Childhood obesity is on the rise around the world, with
consequences for health and wellbeing that persist into
adulthood. At the same time, millions of children do not
receive the necessary nutrition for healthy development of
minds and bodies. Schools are a natural context in which
to address these problems. But, ensuring that schools
provide healthy food is challenging, given the dierent
perspectives of regulators, canteen operators, schools and
other stakeholders.
SCHOOL CANTEENS AND
STUDENT NUTRITION
SCHEMA CASE STUDY #1
University of Amsterdamψ and United Nations
University
Li Fang Fangψt , David Tant, Jose Sirit
The SCHEMA project seeks to improve decision-making
for health and sustainability in Malaysian cities through
the application of systems thinking and place-based
methods. The SCHEMA Case Study Series describes a
set of urban challenges and the actions that have been
taken to address them, highlighting where systems
thinking and place-based perspectives can shed light on
underlying complexity and lead to more eective policies
and interventions.
Canteen - Last days of school by WHZang is licenced under CC 3.0.
Box 1: Training—Language Barriers
Training for incoming canteen operators is provided
by MoH/MoE to develop operator capacity to provide
nutritious food. Training is delivered in standard Bahasa
Malaysia (the national language). However, Malaysia is
highly culturally diverse. Many operators are non-Malay,
with poor command of Bahasa Malaysia, and thus have
diculties beneting from the training. This is a further
challenge for school nutrition in predominantly non-
Malay communities.
SCHEMA
Case studies
15
school food quality: the Ministries of Education (MoE) and
Health (MoH). Three broad mechanisms are used, shown in
Figure 1: food quality standards for school canteens, training
programmes on food preparation for canteen operators, and
monitoring procedures by schools. This system is designed
to be self-correcting: when canteens fail to meet food quality
standards, the monitoring system catches these failures,
penalties are imposed, and canteen operators are motivated
to improve quality. Training programmes ensure that
canteen operators have the knowledge capacity to produce
nutritious food.
Exploring the System
Several obstacles complicate the MoE and MoH eorts.
The eectiveness of monitoring depends on schools, but
school administrations and teachers are tasked with many
responsibilities beyond their primary goal of education.
Monitoring canteen foods may not be a high priority.
Even when school personnel understand the value of
nutrition to student health and educational outcomes, the
perceived importance of monitoring depends on whether
it is seen to achieve desired outcomes. However, canteen
operators are rarely penalised for serving non-nutritious
food; rather, action is taken only in clear cases of food
poisoning.
School personnel may therefore come to view
monitoring the quality of food as inconsequential,
creating a self-perpetuating cycle (Figure 2): shortfalls in
food quality go undetected or unreported, and opportunities
for enforcing penalties are limited. This further reinforces
the perception that monitoring is irrelevant. The monitoring
feedback loop, meant to be a virtuous reinforcing cycle,
becomes a downward spiral instead.
MoE and MoH policy must account for the inuence of
nancial pressures on operator behaviour. Providing
healthy food may require more expensive ingredients and
higher labour costs, reducing prot margins. The rental
auction policy (see Box 2) and the extent to which students
and parents are willing to pay for healthy food also impact
operator prots.
When prots are low, canteen operators may compromise
food quality standards, creating a balancing feedback loop
(Figure 4, B2) that works against the regulatory incentive
Figure 3: Daily monitoring checklist consisting of thirty-ve
items.
Figure 1: Regulatory interventions for improving food quality.
Interventions are shown in green. Positive relationships are
denoted by blue arrows (+) while negative relationships are denoted
by red arrows (-). A central assumption is that penalties based on
monitoring will provide incentives to maintain food quality—this
is reected in the balancing feedback loop (B1) seen here.
Figure 2: The eectiveness of monitoring by schools depends on
intrinsic motivation for food quality and perceived importance
of monitoring. If monitoring results in penalties when food
quality standards are violated, this reinforces the importance of
monitoring among school actors, encouraging continued diligence
in monitoring. This is reected in the reinforcing loop (R1) seen
here.
SCHEMA
Case studies
16
loop (B1). Increasing penalty enforcement and severity
might counteract this, but too much pressure may result in
canteen operators opting out altogether.
Systems Solutions
Box 2: Policy Conicts—Canteen Operator Tenure and Selection
School canteen operators typically receive two-year contracts, extendable for a third upon satisfactory performance.
Contracts are non-renewable and regulatory barriers make it dicult for operators to shift to a dierent school. This
policy, meant to share out the economic benets of this opportunity, has the unintended consequence of limiting operator
experience and increasing training costs.
School canteen contracts are awarded via auction, with the operator oering the highest rent winning the contract. While
this generates funds for the school, it also creates an additional nancial pressure for canteen operators, which in turn
limits their ability and willingness to provide healthy food options.
Using systems thinking to examine the interactions between
policy-makers, schools, and canteen operators reveals a set
of incentives and feedback loops that explains some of the
diculties of providing healthy food in Malaysian public
schools. This case study suggests several possible leverage
points for interventions in this system to produce beer
outcomes:
1. Allow canteen operator contracts to be renewed,
conditional on the provision of food that meets quality
standards. This would not only generate incentive for
canteen operators to provide healthy foods, but also
create new reinforcing loops that increase operator
experience and capacity (R2) and commitment to
healthy food goals (R3).
2. Implement strategies to increase the willingness of
parents and students to pay for healthy foods. This may
include increasing awareness of nutritious food benets
among parents, expanding the supplementary food
programme (Box 3) to cover more nancially vulnerable
students, and preventing competing sales of non-
nutritious food (by school organisations in fundraising
activities or hawkers outside the school compound),
which disadvantages compliant canteen operators.
Box 3: The Supplementary Food Programme
The goal of the supplementary food programme (Program
Rancangan Makanan Tambahan) is to improve the
physical and mental health of vulnerable school children.
Primary school children from families falling below the
hardcore poverty line are eligible. Meals are provided
via school canteens for up to 190 school days per year.
The budgeted amount per meal is RM 2.50 in Peninsular
Malaysia, and RM 3.00 in Sabah and Sarawak. There is
also a free school milk scheme (Figure 5), targeted at
the same demographic, with milk sponsored by private
companies or NGOs in collaboration with MOE.
Figure 4: Regulatory interventions for food quality are counteracted
by canteen operator nancial pressures. Providing high-quality
food raises costs and lowers protability, and low prot margins
reduce motivation and ability of operators to provide high-quality
food, reected in the balancing loop, B2. Low parent and student
willingness to pay for quality food and auction policies for school
canteen contracts increase the pressure imposed by B2. Lack of
contract renewal options limit operator experience and knowledge
capacity.
Figure 5: “One Malayisa School Milk.” by CEphoto, Uwe
Aranasm is licenced under CC3.0.
SCHEMA
Case studies
17
hp://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/
documents/resources/wfp290540.pdf
3. Change the auction-based contract system. One
alternative is for MoE/MoH to pay school canteen
operators for a service, instead of canteen operators
receiving payment from students. This would give MoE/
MoH more control over menus and relieve nancial
pressure on canteen operators. Implementing such a
change would require nancial investment from both
Ministries.
4. Improve the monitoring system by (i) enforcing
penalties for failing to meet food quality standards, so
that school personnel see their monitoring eorts as
impactful; (ii) provide nancial and personnel resources
for schools to carry out nutrition monitoring; and (iii)
create an incentive for schools to prioritise monitoring
by conducting periodic MoE/MoH inspections, with
penalties for schools that fail to achieve food quality
standards, creating a reinforcing loop (R4) that improves
monitoring.
Further Reading
1. “Ensuring healthier school meals.”
hps://www.nst.com.my/news/2016/06/
154725/ensuring-healthier-school-meals
2. “The supplementary food programme.”
hp://www.moe.gov.my/index.php/en/bantuan-
pembelajaran/rancangan-makanan-tambahan-rmt
3. “How school meals contribute to the Sustainable
Development Goals: A collection of evidence.”
Figure 6: System of interactions
between policy-makers, schools,
and canteen operators, with
proposed points of intervention
shown in green. Doed arrows
reect new causal linkages
expected to arise because of these
proposed interventions, creating
desirable feedback loops (R2,
R3, and R4), while thick arrows
indicate changes to existing
relationships.
Reading Causal Loop Diagrams
Relationships between two variables are represented with
arrows. Here, positive relationships (change in X results
in a change in the same direction for Y) are described
with blue arrows and a “+” sign; negative relationships
(change in X results in a change in the opposite direction
for Y) are described with red arrows and a “-” sign.
When two or more variables interact in a loop, the eect
can be reinforcing (acting to amplify change), or balancing
(acting to oppose change and maintain equilibrium).
These loops and their interactions with each other drive
systems behaviour, often in surprising ways.
Positive Negative
Balancing Reinforcing
SCHEMA
Case studies
18
Local Context
Diabetes is a major health concern in Malaysia, aecting
almost one in ve Malaysian adults. By 2025, 7 million
Malaysian adults are projected to develop diabetes (Figure
1). To counter this trend, the National Strategic Plan for Non-
Communicable Disease 2016-2025 established a national
target for diabetes prevalence of 15% in 2025. Healthy food
choices are essential to reaching this goal.
Exploring the System
Food choices do not occur in isolation, but are inuenced by
Overview
In 2014, the World Health Organization estimated that 422
million adults were living with diabetes, making it one of the
four most prevalent non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
In most countries, including Malaysia, this prevalence is
rising. Addressing the key risk factors for Type II diabetes-
unhealthy diets and physical inactivity is critical to taming
this trend. In turn, this depends on remaking our daily
environments, which, whether at home or in the workplace,
strongly inuence our decisions on what, where, when, and
how to eat and be active.
HEALTHY FOOD CHOICES
AND DIABETES
SCHEMA CASE STUDY #2
Penang Instituteψ and United Nations Universityt
Lim Chee Hanψ, Esther Sinirisan Chongψ, and David
Tant
The SCHEMA project seeks to improve decision-making
for health and sustainability in Malaysian cities through
the application of systems thinking and place-based
methods. The SCHEMA Case Study Series describes a
set of urban challenges and the actions that have been
taken to address them, highlighting where systems
thinking and place-based perspectives can shed light on
underlying complexity and lead to more eective policies
and interventions.
Figure 1: Projection on the Prevalence (%) of Diabetes in Malaysia,
2015-2025, National Strategic Plan for Non Communicable
Disease NSP-NCD 2016-2025.
SCHEMA
Case studies
19
many dierent factors. One such factor is simple familiarity
(Figure 2). We tend to choose foods we are accustomed to,
which in turn reinforces our preference for those foods—
we become habituated to a certain diet (R1). When lifestyle
factors or dietary norms lead us to healthy food choices, this
reinforcing feedback relationship can act to help us maintain
healthy diets; under these circumstances, we are also less
enticed by unhealthy foods (R2). However, when other
factors lead us to unhealthy food choices, these will also be
reinforced, eroding our healthy eating habits.
Food choices are also inuenced by convenience and
cost. The pressures of urban life, work demands, trac
congestion, and the rise of dual-income households have
led to a decline in home cooking. Consequently, 64% of
Malaysians eat at least one meal per day outside of the
home. Such meals are less likely to be healthy than home-
cooked food. Time pressure also reduces willingness to look
for outlets serving healthy food, with many people making
such choices based on time and cost alone. Increasing the
number of healthy food options could make healthy food
choices easier. However, food options are generally driven
by market demand (Figure 4), with collective food choices
creating another set of competing loops (R3 and R4) that
inuence whether healthy or unhealthy food options
dominate. Indeed, healthy foods remain a niche market,
with most products competing, instead, on the basis of cost
and convenience—criteria that tend to favour unhealthy
options.
Health Promotion and Knowledge
The foregoing suggests that maintaining the status quo
with respect to food choices in Malaysia is likely to
entrench unhealthy dietary habits and contribute to rising
diabetes. Various groups have undertaken health promotion
campaigns, assuming that increased knowledge of the
consequences of unhealthy eating will motivate people to
Figure 2: Food choices are an important factor in surging diabetes
rates. When individuals are highly habituated to healthy food, they
tend to choose such foods and avoid unhealthy foods. Each of these
sets of food choices involves a reinforcing loop (R1 and R2) that
strengthens the habit of eating well. However, when the extent of
habituation to healthy food is low, these same causal structures
can further erode the tendency to eat well: low habituation leads
individuals to choose unhealthy foods and avoid healthy ones.
These reinforcing loops form a “Success to the Successful”
systems archetype, in which one outcome tends to dominate,
making it hard to shift to the alternate state. In situations where
unhealthy food choices are frequent, R2 will dominate, leading to
lower habituation. Where healthy food choices are frequent, R1
will dominate, leading to higher habituation.
Figure 4: Modern urban life creates challenges for maintaining
healthy diets. Time pressure from hectic lifestyles discourages
home cooking, which is usually healthier than eating out. Also,
healthy foods often cost more, and healthy food outlets are often
scarce. These barriers to healthy eating encourage a higher
frequency of unhealthy food choices. The supply of healthy or
unhealthy food options is driven by demand, i.e., by the frequency
of healthy or unhealthy food choices. Increased supply makes for
easier access, thus making it easier (R3) or more dicult (R4) to
eat healthily, and further reinforcing existing food choices.
Figure 3: Malaysian ‘kuih’—bite-sized desserts.
Box 1: Malaysian Food Culture
Food is so central to Malaysian society, that ‘Dah makan?’
(i.e., ‘Have you eaten?’) or the equivalent in other local
dialects is a common greeting. Many towns are known for
particular dishes, and day trips to savour these culinary
specialties are not uncommon. Twenty-four hour eateries
have become a key part of the urban night life. Striking a
balance between maintaining a vibrant food culture and
creating a healthy eating environment is a challenge.
SCHEMA
Case studies
20
make healthier choices (Figure 5). Similarly, regulations
for nutrition labelling and claims have been enforced since
2003, to improve food choices by supplying consumers
with beer information. However, most Malaysians do not
read food labels, and those who do may not understand the
implications. Furthermore, the continuing rise in obesity
and diabetes rates in the face of increasing health literacy
highlights the limitations of information as a mechanism for
behavioural change.
Systems Solutions
Experience suggests that health information alone is
insucient to motivate healthier food choices at the levels
necessary to reduce obesity and health consequences like
diabetes at the societal level. In all likelihood, the solutions
to these problems require structural changes to urban living
environments that make healthy food choices simple and
straightforward. The complexity of such environments
and the persistence of these problems imply that multiple
simultaneous points of intervention by many actors will be
needed for eective change. A few possibilities are described
here (Figure 6).
Establishing new relationships with and around food may
also aect the motivations that inuence food choices.
Community cooking activities can enhance cooking skills
Box 2: Sugar Intake
Average sugar consumption in Malaysia was 26 teaspoons
a day in 2005—more than four times the recommended
allowance. A large fraction of this sugar comes in the
form of local ‘kuih,’ often consumed with meals and as
snacks throughout the day, and condensed milk, added
to tea or coee.
Figure 5: A variety of actors have made eorts to change
individual dietary choices by providing beer information—for
example, through health promotion campaigns or food labels. The
assumption is that beer knowledge of the consequences of food
choices will increase motivation to make healthy choices. However,
in general, the strength of the knowledge on food and health has
limited ability to aect healthy food choices—the doed arrows in
this diagram reect this weak relationship.
Box 3: Fast Food—Symptom and Cause
The popularity of fast food, increasing among Malaysia’s
youth, is both a symptom and cause of broader unhealthy
food choices. On the one hand, it reects a desire for
convenience and a reduced appreciation for healthy
food, factors that also drive other unhealthy food choices.
On the other, accessible, aordable fast food increases
habituation to unhealthy diets.
Various solutions have been suggested. Limiting exposure
during formative childhood years may be important—fast
food commercials are already banned during television
programming aimed at children, and further restrictions
could be considered. Another step could be restriction of
local authority-issued operator licences, such as in the
vicinity of schools. However, broader aempts to restrict
fast food outlets may have unintended consequences—
for example, they may lead to fewer but larger outlets
and expansion of delivery services, counteracting the
intended eect. Moreover, without addressing the
factors that drive food choices, consumers may simply be
diverted to other unhealthy foods.
Figure 6: Changing food choices requires changing our relationship
with food and the environment in which we made these choices.
Some points for interventions, shown in green, include the supply
of health and unhealthy food options, time pressure, and societal
support for healthy eating.
SCHEMA
Case studies
21
and provide peer support, inspiring sustained interest in
cooking in some individuals. Involvement with community
gardens can also shape perceptions of and connections with
food in ways that motivate healthy food choices, as can
increasing awareness of traditional foods and food cultures.
Because the work environment is the site for a substantial
fraction of food choices, employers have important roles to
play. Dining spaces and kitchen facilities can be designed to
encourage employees to bring homecooked food. Flexibility
in scheduling can provide time needed for cooking, while
worksite programmes can encourage healthy lifestyles and
support community activities.
There may also be beer channels for delivery of diet-
relevant health information than health promotion
campaigns. Indeed, primary care providers can build
relationships and provide targeted advice, linking diets
to specic patient health issues. Primary care may thus
strengthen the link between knowledge and behavioural
change, while providing other health benets.
These and other solutions (e.g., Box 3) take place at dierent
scales and involve a variety of actors that may not be
typically considered in health promotion eorts. Creative
engagement and policy design will be needed to enable the
multiple points of intervention necessary to change existing
environments to support healthy food choices.
Further Reading
1. “Knowing is not half the bale: Impacts of the National
Health Screening Program in Korea.”
hp://ftp.iza.org/dp10650.pdf
2. “Obesogenic environments: exploring the built and
food environments.”
hp://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdocad?doi=10.1.1.470.
7110&rep=rep1&type =pdf
3. “The results of a worksite health promotion
programme in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.”
hps://academic.oup.com/heapro/article/21/4/301/
687954
4. “Obesity systems inuence diagram.”
hp://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.
cfm?id=622
5. “Consumers’ preference and consumption towards fast
food: Evidence from Malaysia.”
hps://www.researchgate.net/publication/277076342_
Consumers%27_preference_and_consumption_
towards_fast_food_Evidence_from_Malaysia
Reading Causal Loop Diagrams
Relationships between two variables are represented with
arrows. Here, positive relationships (change in X results
in a change in the same direction for Y) are described
with blue arrows and a “+” sign; negative relationships
(change in X results in a change in the opposite direction
for Y) are described with red arrows and a “-” sign.
When two or more variables interact in a loop, the eect
can be reinforcing (acting to amplify change), or balancing
(acting to oppose change and maintain equilibrium).
These loops and their interactions with each other drive
systems behaviour, often in surprising ways.
Positive Negative
Balancing Reinforcing
Figure 7: Morning greetings from a fast food giant tempt road
users along a busy highway in the Klang Valley.
SCHEMA
Case studies
22
Local Context
By 2030, 78% of Malaysians will live in cities. Growing
populations are spurring the construction of concrete
buildings to accommodate housing, lifestyle needs, and
commercial uses, to the detriment of green spaces. In fact,
over the last decade, land use in Malaysian cities has changed
dramatically, as forests and green spaces are converted to
built-up area. Such changes are visible not only in the Klang
Valley, but also in smaller townships such as Buerworth,
Penang.
The Buerworth Baharu baseline study sought to beer
understand land use and green space in this small city.
The downtown area was identied as a place where issues
Overview
In our increasingly urban world, the global population has
reached 7.6 billion and counting, and more than 1 billion
new urban dwellers are expected by 2030. As cities develop
and urban populations grow and become denser, the green
spaces that contribute to healthy lifestyles and environments
are at risk of being replaced with greyer built environments,
thus reducing quality of life.
GREENING BUTTERWORTH:
REJUVENATING SPACES
SCHEMA CASE STUDY #3
Think Cityψ and United Nations Universityt
Daniel Leeψ, Murali Ramψ, and David Tant
The SCHEMA project seeks to improve decision-making
for health and sustainability in Malaysian cities through
the application of systems thinking and place-based
methods. The SCHEMA Case Study Series describes a
set of urban challenges and the actions that have been
taken to address them, highlighting where systems
thinking and place-based perspectives can shed light on
underlying complexity and lead to more eective policies
and interventions.
Box 1: Buerworth Baharu Programme
The Buerworth Baharu Programme is an initiative to
rejuvenate the city of Buerworth. The objectives of the
programme are:
1. Improvements to and activation of public spaces
2. Realising land use potential
3. Celebrating historic Buerworth
4. Making a culturally vibrant and liveable City
5. Embedding a strong sense of community and place
identity
SCHEMA
Case studies
23
of unused and unproductive space could be benecially
addressed. Downtown Buerworth has a population of
23,747, or 85 residents/ha, a high density relative to the rest of
Buerworth and, indeed, to other urban centres in Malaysia.
Only 4.8 ha of open space was identied in the downtown
area, much of this poorly neglected and underused. This
is woefully insucient by both national (2 ha per 1,000
persons, National Urbanisation Policy 2) and international
(9 ha per 1,000 persons, WHO) standards.
Exploring the System
Local authorities play a key role in creating and maintaining
green spaces and other public amenities, but have limited
resources. Establishing new green spaces requires
resources and increases subsequent maintenance demands,
potentially making local authorities reluctant to do so, even
when underutilised or convertible spaces are available.
We can visualise this as a balancing feedback loop which
stabilises the number or total size of green spaces available
in a community (Figure 1).
Maintenance of existing green spaces poses a further
challenge (Figure 3). Typically, decisions must be made
about how to allocate a set amount of resources designated
for green spaces (B2). Well-maintained spaces aract
more users and often yield economic and other benets,
generating incentives for authorities to continue funding
maintenance activities, thus creating a reinforcing feedback
loop (R1). Aractive and well-used spaces may also give rise
to community ownership, which can promote behaviours
that help local authorities maintain amenities, another
reinforcing loop (R2). R1 and R2 can sustain maintenance
eorts, but can also work in the reverse direction. When
a space is poorly maintained due to a lack of resources, it
becomes less aractive; fewer people use it and economic
and other benets fade away. The space diminishes in
importance to the local authority and the community, further
limiting incentives to allocate resources and undermining
community ownership.
Addressing the Problem
One way to promote the development of urban green space
is through eorts for urban rejuvenation; such eorts—
from local authorities or community actors—may increase
the aractiveness of existing spaces or even create new
green space (Figure 4). They aim to catalyse the reinforcing
feedback loops that lead to local authority and community
support (R1 and R2).
The initial Buerworth study led to development of a plan
Figure 2: Think City sta explaining the new design of Lebuh
Kampung Benggali Pocket Park to residents at the launch of the
revitalised park.
Figure 1: Many urban areas have underutilised lots that could be
repurposed into healthy green spaces. However, local authorities
have limited resources for establishing and maintaining such
amenities. Newly-established green spaces carry high costs and
increase maintenance requirements, reducing both local resources
and the capacity to establish other new amenities. This balancing
feedback loop (B1) limits the overall quantity and quality of green
spaces, unless further resources are allocated for this purpose. Figure 3: When a green space is well-maintained, it draws
many users and provides various benets, creating incentives
for continued maintenance, a reinforcing feedback loop (R1).
Local communities may also take ownership of these spaces; their
involvement increases available resources and capacity (R2).
Conversely, because local authorities must allocate resources and
capacity among multiple green spaces (B2), underinvestment in
maintenance of a particular space may cause R1 and R2 to enter
a downward spiral.
SCHEMA
Case studies
24
to rejuvenate the city. Under this plan, local residents
participated in community engagement sessions to
communicate their priorities. Based on this information, two
underutilised locations were selected for transformation.
The rst instance involved restoration of the aractiveness
and utility of a dilapidated green space, the Kampung
Benggali Pocket Park, in February 2017, while the second
involved the creation of a new green space, the Jeti Lama
Rain Garden, in a concrete landscape in October 2017.
Surrounded by high-rise apartments, the original Kampung
Benggali park was infrequently used. Increasingly
unaractive conditions, a lack of play and exercise
equipment, and a low-cost fencing enclosure meant to
safeguard users from the open drain made the space
uninviting. Under the Buerworth Baharu programme, the
park was restored, and now features native plants, a large
swing, walking paths, and outdoor exercise equipment
for community use. It is now well used by residents and
promotes community togetherness while contributing to
physical health and mental well-being.
The second space, at the end of Jalan Jeti Lama, was an
underutilised car park. Liered with pigeon droppings,
bird feed and discarded trash, it was only rarely used by
visitors to the nearby market and temple. Save for two
marginal periods of activity in mornings and evenings, it
remained empty. Indeed, it was only fully utilised during
two annual events: the Buerworth Fringe Festival and the
Hindu rewalking ceremony.
This space was reimagined as a rain garden, transforming
the site and bringing life and vibrancy back to a hard
landscape devoid of aesthetic quality or functional use. The
project converted 810 m2 of tarmac and an adjoining 210
m2 of concrete into a park with dedicated parking facilities,
while retaining its availability as an open space for events.
Trees were planted, and the space features an interactive
water pump for children. The garden also allows rainwater
run-o to be absorbed into a local pond. These changes
have, moreover, contributed to local biodiversity, enabling
the return of dragonies, frogs and other ora and fauna.
Box 2: Kampung Benggali
With its aable old town atmosphere, this veritable
“downtown” space has possibly the highest concentration
of multi-racial commercial outlets in Buerworth. The
neighbourhood has a variety of community-based stores,
coee shops and restaurants in rows of shophouses.
The pleasant mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian outlets
is reected in the diversity of cuisine one nds here. The
enclave is among the local hubs that long-time residents
of Buerworth have been most familiar with and where
the congenial urban essence of the town can be felt.
Figure 5: Buerworth Fringe Festival at the greened Jeti Lama
carpark-turned-rain garden.
Figure 4: Civil society groups and other actors may invest
resources in urban rejuvenation, shown in green, with eects
on key variables shown with doed arrows. This can increase
the aractiveness of existing green spaces, driving the R1 and
R2 loops in a positive direction, or increase resources for the
establishment of new amenities, thus seing the balancing point
of the B1 loop at a higher level.
Box 3: Jeti Lama
This old precinct is a historic selement that rst appeared
in a map of Buerworth in 1820, the principal town in
Province Wellesley (Seberang Perai). The local name for
Buerworth was Bagan, which means quay or landing-
place. Buerworth and its immediate suburbs were
doed with piers along their coast, which served as entry
points to the prosperous agricultural interior. Jeti Lama
was where the old passenger jey used to be for boats
crossing the channel to and from George Town. Its early
godowns, vintage shophouses and old public market still
remain active today.
SCHEMA
Case studies
25
Sustaining and Replicating Success
The Kampung Benggali and Jeti Lama projects show how
eorts by civil society groups and other actors can drive
positive systemic changes to enhance public amenities. Local
authorities are critical actors, but may lack the nancial
capital and manpower to implement desirable public
projects alone, or to sustain eorts, particularly during
economic downturns. In Buerworth, the Seberang Perai
Municipal Council (MPSP) recognised these constraints and
established a Public-Private-People Partnership programme,
with 24 projects for parks and other public spaces initiated
since 2012.
The projects described here were designed to demonstrate
the viability and value of reclaiming underutilised urban
spaces. Successful implementation can inspire other groups
to partner with MPSP on similar eorts, and provide a road
map for doing so. We can visualise this as a new reinforcing
loop, R3, that promotes further partnerships (Figure 6).
These, in turn, can secure resources and community-local
authority cooperation for the long-term health of amenities.
Ongoing visualisation and nurturing of partnerships will be
crucial for maintaining green space in Buerworth.
Further Reading
1. “Agent-based modelling of urban tropical green
infrastructure investment.”
hp://www.frsb.upm.edu.my/dokumen/FKRSE1_127-
474-1-PB.pdf
2. “Green infrastructure in cities and towns in Southeast
Asian countries: quest for research.”
hps://www.academia.edu/23482347/Green_
infrastructure_in_cities_and_towns_in_Southeast_
Asian_countries_quest_for_research?auto=download
Figure 6: In good times, the reinforcing
loops R1 and R2 act to bolster resources
for establishing and maintaining
green spaces. However, a shock to
the system can shift these loops into
a negative phase where they reduce
such resources. Urban rejuvenation
eorts can counter such eects, but
are usually of limited duration. New
variables and relationships, indicated
with green text and doed arrows
respectively, show how the success of
rejuvenation eorts can be leveraged to
promote further action (R3).
Reading Causal Loop Diagrams
Relationships between two variables are represented with
arrows. Here, positive relationships (change in X results
in a change in the same direction for Y) are described
with blue arrows and a “+” sign; negative relationships
(change in X results in a change in the opposite direction
for Y) are described with red arrows and a “-” sign.
When two or more variables interact in a loop, the eect
can be reinforcing (acting to amplify change), or balancing
(acting to oppose change and maintain equilibrium).
These loops and their interactions with each other drive
systems behaviour, often in surprising ways.
Positive Negative
Balancing Reinforcing
SCHEMA
Case studies
26
environments, along with the innate hidden benets that
lie therein. However, universities face many competing
demands and missions, which place pressure on their desire
and ability to ll this role.
Local Context
Rimba Ilmu (RI), Malay for “Forest of Knowledge,” is a
botanical garden established in the University of Malaya
(UM) in 1974 to foster biodiversity conservation, nature
education and tropical plant research. Situated between
Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya, it houses over 1,600
species of plants on 150 acres, constituting an important
green lung for the metropolitan area and a facility for
nature-related education. The garden’s plant collections,
permanent exhibition, and conservatory are essential tools
for nature education (see Box 1), hosting hundreds of school
classes and receiving visitors from all corners of the world.
Such a unique facility is potentially of high value to UM,
but has not been prioritised for investment in recent years.
This case study explores the institutional opportunities and
challenges RI faces in fullling its mission.
Exploring the System
RI is managed by the Institut Sains Biologi (Institute of
Overview
In many cities, high land use competition creates shortages
of green space, which is important to healthy living
environments. Yet older universities are often among the
most land rich of urban actors, having been founded on
the outskirts of cities that then sprawled beyond them. In
tandem with their educational capacity and mission, this
uniquely positions such institutions to preserve urban green
spaces and provide urban-dwellers with access to natural
HOLDING ONTO A MISSION
FOR CONSERVATION AND
EDUCATION
SCHEMA CASE STUDY #4
University of Malaya ψ and United Nations Universityt
M. Sugumaranψ, David Tant, and Benjamin Ongψ
The SCHEMA project seeks to improve decision-making
for health and sustainability in Malaysian cities through
the application of systems thinking and place-based
methods. The SCHEMA Case Study Series describes a
set of urban challenges and the actions that have been
taken to address them, highlighting where systems
thinking and place-based perspectives can shed light on
underlying complexity and lead to more eective policies
and interventions.
SCHEMA
Case studies
27
Biological Sciences, ISB), the largest institute in UM, with
many other research facilities and a wide variety of degree
programmes. ISB founded RI with a mission of conservation
and nature education, and made large investments into
infrastructure and personnel to enable its success. The 1970s
and 80s were intense periods of expansion and consolidation
for the garden, with various core collections established. In
the 1990s, UM’s higher management invested in a multi-
purpose administrative building for RI.
However, ISB’s primary measures of success have always
been the number of research publications produced and
the number of students graduated. RI’s conservation and
education work supports the broad mission of research and
teaching at the ISB, but lacks a direct impact on these key
productivity indicators. Thus, maintaining the ISB’s interest
in and support for RI’s mission is a challenge. Indeed, many
institutions respond to a failure to achieve goals by lowering
expectations rather than by increasing eort and investment
(Figure 1).
This challenge was initially met by ISB’s Heads of Department
(Figure 2). They upheld conservation and lifelong education
as ISB priorities, and RI’s outputs met those priorities. They
set and kept high standards for RI, oseing the tendency
to reduce expectations, and ensured that ISB invested in RI,
maintaining and expanding RI’s capacity.
However, this reliance of the system on individual
champions (ISB HoD) to hold a mission together poses a
risk: shift in sta members can undermine programmes.
Loss of key persons, shift in university-level priorities
toward peer-reviewed publication outputs, and reduction
in ISB resources due to university funding cuts (especially
from year 2012 onwards) have made it dicult to support
groups like RI whose outputs are not easily quantiable
(Figure 3). This is exacerbated by competing demands for
ISB funding, such as the upkeep of the department’s other
teaching and research facilities.
For this reason, while the University does fund major
upgrades of RI facilities, these tend to be few and far between:
once a decade or so. Consequently, RI has been maintained
as a static resource, with higher management viewing RI as
primarily an outdoor museum, with lile emphasis on its
conservation, educational and health benets. The success
of RI is tied to its mission, expectations, and capacity.
RI’s resources and capacity have been built over several
decades, and its reputation within and without the campus
has developed likewise. Thus, although the University’s
direction and priorities have shifted, the public and other
Box 1: Conservation and Educational Features of
Rimba Ilmu
Key features of RI include: (1) plant collections, including
medicinal plants, palms, citrus & citroids, ferns, bamboos
and timber trees; (2) The Rain Forest and Its Environment,
a permanent exhibition centre accessible to the general
public, which operates as a self-learning facility
highlighting the importance and biodiversity of the
rainforest, as well as the consequences of deforestation;
(3) the herbarium, a research and education facility with
74,000 specimens—dried plant materials that are stored
systematically for taxonomical and conservation-related
studies; (4) the Rare Plants and Orchids Conservatory,
with over 200 living species of wild orchids and other
rare plants under pressure from habitat destruction.
Figure 1: The Institute of Biological Sciences (ISB) invests in
Rimba Ilmu (RI) monetarily and in terms of academic sta inputs.
Ideally, when RI’s outputs fall short of ISB’s expectations, ISB
should increase their investment, creating a balancing feedback
loop that brings RI outputs back on target (B1). However, an
alternative option is to respond to shortfalls by adjusting goals
downward, creating a second balancing loop (B2) that lowers
expectations. In practice, the second loop is often favoured because
it requires less investment of resources and because reaching targets
often involves a time delay. This causal structure, involving two
balancing loops, is well known as the systems archetype, “Drifting
Goals.”
Figure 2: The tendency for goals to shift had previously been
balanced by Heads of Department (HoD), who placed a high value
on outputs not related to ISB KPI (e.g., conservation, informal
education, access to nature, etc.). In doing so, they ensured that
these outputs factor into the gap between contributions and
expectations (B1b), which determines investment.
SCHEMA
Case studies
28
stakeholders still expect traditional outputs from RI (Box
2). Unfortunately, RI’s capacity to deliver this is gradually
being eroded by withdrawal of consistent, reliable support.
As with most complex issues in urban health and
sustainability, many stakeholders are involved. While ISB,
understandably, seeks rst to meet its internal priorities,
it seems likely that a broader consultative process would
allow new insights into the existing and potential value of
RI for its broad mission of conservation and education.
Systems Solutions
How can RI’s mission and capacity for conservation,
education, and healthy environments be kept alive while
operating within ISB and UM institutional priorities? There
are various possibilities, each with various potentials and
pitfalls (Figure 5).
1. The simplest solution would be to realign RI’s mission
to beer t UM’s research and nancial priorities.
This could be viewed as producing high-impact
research articles with available facilities, together with
maximising income-genearing activities in RI. This
may gain beer institutional support from the ISB and
UM, at the risk of compromising RI’s historical focus on
lifelong education and conservation.
2. Realigning UM’s institutional structure, such that
management of RI is partly or entirely given over to
another institutional entity that places higher value on
non-academic outputs like conservation and lifelong
learning. One such possibility would be spliing the
management of RI between the UM Department of
Development and Estates Maintenance (JPPHB) and ISB.
In this scenario, JPPHB handles general maintenance of
RI’s garden and buildings, reducing the nancial burden
on ISB, while ISB oversees the academic operations,
educational programmes, and garden interpretation
such as the seing up of new collections. This is only
eective to the extent that the new supporting institution
Box 2: Multi-stakeholder Dimensions of an Urban Forest Reserve
Hewn out of the Bukit Arang forest reserve complex, RI was set up in an aractive site with hills, valleys and natural
running streams. Over the years, RI’s value has extended beyond supporting research and teaching at the ISB to
supporting the wellbeing of UM sta, students and visitors, and more generally, of urban residents. As with all urban
green space, RI contributes to improving air quality and moderating urban heat; it is also an area where visitors can
have deep contact with nature, with all the aendant benets for health. RI plays an important role in facilitating access
through guided tours, and through such experiences, visitors develop a closer bond with natural systems, a critical need
in cities where such opportunities are few and far between. In addition to public use, it has beneted medical, pharmacy,
and built-environment students who learn about medicinal and landscaping plants. While upkeep of the garden and
protection of RI may have become a diminished priority, various questions remain about RI’s role in the context of space,
place, and society.
Figure 3: Several issues have emerged that have undercut
investment in RI, highlighted in green. There is a loss of congruity
between the RI mission and university priorities, due to an
increasing emphasis on academic publications. This, combined
with changes in ISB HoDs have reduced the value placed by
ISB on RI’s non-KPI outputs. Additionally, funding cuts to the
university have limited ISB resources, pressuring ISB ability to
invest in RI.
Figure 4: Rimba Ilmu’s guided walks aract local and international
visitors across all walks of life. This is educational recreation:
learning and reconnecting with nature while having a good dose
of exercise. Image courtesy of Sugumaran Manickam.
SCHEMA
Case studies
29
is aligned with RI’s mission. Otherwise, withdrawal of
support could compromise RI in the future, with the
further complication of navigating multiple managers.
3. Moving towards partial or complete self-suciency.
This involves engaging donors and businesses, and
recruiting enough volunteers (currently limited by
RI sta management and training capacity) and/or
generating sucient income to support dedicated non-
UM sta (see Box 3). Furthermore, this may only be
possible with signicant upfront investment (e.g., to
train and monitor volunteers), and it is not certain that
ISB would allow or support such a move.
These possibilities all involve working within or around ISB
and UM institutional priorities and paradigms. An alternate
approach—engaging with, and aempting to change these
priorities and paradigms is presented in the Rimba Project
SCHEMA case study (SCHEMA Case Study #5).
Figure 5: There are several strategies Rimba
Ilmu (RI) can aempt to address its capacity
challenges. Proposed strategies are shown in
green. Doed arrows show new causal linkages.
RI may aempt to strengthen realign its mission
to beer reect ISB KPIs. Alternatively, RI could
seek support from another UM institutional
entity that beer ts its mission (not shown in
diagram). Finally, it could move toward greater
self-suciency by investing its capacity in
income-generating and volunteer and partner
building eorts, creating self-sustaining R1 and
R2 loops.
Reading Causal Loop Diagrams
Relationships between two variables are represented with
arrows. Here, positive relationships (change in X results
in a change in the same direction for Y) are described
with blue arrows and a “+” sign; negative relationships
(change in X results in a change in the opposite direction
for Y) are described with red arrows and a “-” sign.
When two or more variables interact in a loop, the eect
can be reinforcing (acting to amplify change), or balancing
(acting to oppose change and maintain equilibrium).
These loops and their interactions with each other drive
systems behaviour, often in surprising ways.
Positive Negative
Balancing Reinforcing
Box 3: Rimba Ilmu, the Rimba Project, and
Maintaining Third-Party Support
Over the last few years, RI has seen a renewed interest in
the eyes of higher management. The incumbent Deputy
Vice-Chancellor (Development) (DVC(D)) has aempted
to address shortfalls and deciencies in RI’s management.
The Rimba Project, a campus sustainability Living
Lab co-funded by the DVC(D), is one such strategy. In
contrast with preceding third-party interventions, the
Rimba Project is deeply embedded within Rimba Ilmu,
functioning as a go-between for collaborations with
external parties such as NGOs, hobby groups, social
enterprises, and volunteers. One recent success is the
Trailblazers initiative, a volunteer-led creation of new
trails and interpreted sections in Rimba Ilmu (the rst in
nearly 20 years) that was overseen by the Rimba Project. In
return, the DVC(D) has given RI and the Rimba Project a
mandate to assist UM’s Department of Development and
Estates Maintenance (JPPHB) in improving conservation
and management of UM’s landscape and green spaces.
SCHEMA
Case studies
30
conversations and challenges to established conventions
strengthen their ability to full this role.
One debate on the role of universities involves the
development of urban spaces. Like other urban institutions,
Overview
What is the purpose of a university? The scope of its vision
determines what it strives to achieve and the resources it
commits to these endeavours. Graduates and research are
often the most tangible products, but, universities can also
be living laboratories for investigating and demonstrating
approaches to sustainability and wellbeing. Because
universities shape societal paradigms and norms, this can
be a pivotal role. University institutions that enable critical
CHALLENGING LAND
USE PARADIGMS IN A
UNIVERSITY CONTEXT
SCHEMA CASE STUDY #5
University of Malaya
Benjamin Ong and Faisal Raq Mahamd Adikan
The SCHEMA project seeks to improve decision-making
for health and sustainability in Malaysian cities through
the application of systems thinking and place-based
methods. The SCHEMA Case Study Series describes a
set of urban challenges and the actions that have been
taken to address them, highlighting where systems
thinking and place-based perspectives can shed light on
underlying complexity and lead to more eective policies
and interventions.
Figure 1: The extent to which undeveloped land is perceived as
underutilised aects the extent of new development, which can,
in turn, generate new income (R1) and/or lead to the loss of
environmental and health benets from unbuilt spaces, including
green spaces (R2). Conversely, when unbuilt land is perceived as
valuable, low rates of development will preserve environmental
and health benets, but limit new income. These competing
paradigms involve two reinforcing feedback loops. Over time, one
of the two paradigms will tend to become dominant, determining
university land use decisions.
SCHEMA
Case studies
31
universities face tremendous pressure to develop land,
leading to competing paradigms: on the one hand, that
unbuilt land is underutilised, and on the other, that it has
intrinsic value, providing environmental and health benets
for the university and surrounding community (Figure 1).
Local Context
Recent national budget cuts have removed substantial public
funds from university operating budgets. Universities, in
turn, have sought alternative sources of income (Figure 2).
For example, the University of Malaya (UM) proposed to
commercialise a portion of its land adjacent to the Section
12 suburban residential area to construct a mega-hospital,
the UM Health Metropolis, a proposal strongly opposed by
local resident groups that felt it would aggravate trac and
disrupt the character of their community.
Addressing the Problem
The Section 12 conservation project was an initiative
commissioned by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for
Development (DVC(D)) and executed by the Rimba Project,
a campus sustainability Living Lab initiative for landscape
management and biodiversity conservation. The Rimba
Project was tasked with conducting a biodiversity survey
on the proposed project site, as a form of ecological impact
assessment prior to development (Figure 3).
Unexpectedly, the 15-acre land parcel proposed for
development was found to host a diverse range of plants
and animals, including species, like reies, not commonly
found in urban areas. The Rimba Project’s eorts in
documenting the history, biodiversity, and environmental
benets of the Section 12 land bank reinforced the perception
of the intrinsic value of this undeveloped land. Driven
by the Rimba Project’s results, the DVC(D) advocated for
preservation of the land, also suggesting that the principle
of “planned negligence”—allowing land to lie fallow for
ecological benets—be considered in developing University
land use strategies. Ecological surveys have also been made
mandatory in the context of any campus development
proposal. All these factors favour the paradigm that
recognises the intrinsic value of unused land, seen in R2 of
Figure 1.
While the present University management has decided to
invest in capacity for environmental studies and ecological
surveys, the example of Rimba Ilmu (SCHEMA case study #4)
shows this may not always be the case. Furthermore, forgoing
income from development to preserve environmental
and health benets further constricts the University’s
Box 1: Language and Land Paradigms
The concept of development in Malaysia itself complicates
land use. The Malay word for ‘development’ is
‘pembangunan’ (development) or ‘pemajuan’ (progress),
words that in the local context are typically associated
with the act of clearing land for commercial purposes.
This is often coupled with visions of skyscrapers and
hi-tech infrastructural development, advances that are
typically perceived in a positive light. Undeveloped
land is associated with words like ‘terbiar’ (neglected);
perceived imperfection of such land banks gives it low
value in the eyes of developers and conservationists
alike. The idea of “unproductive land” does not sit well
with a development agenda that still largely promotes
anthropocentric agency, inuence and control over land.
Figure 2: Pressure to generate income may spur development of
university land. The resulting income alleviates this pressure,
creating a balancing loop (B1), which can limit R1. However,
reductions in external university funding have reduced university
resources, changing the balancing point of the B1 loop and
strengthening the R1 loop. One such result was the plan to turn a
rewilded space into a medical centre.
Figure 3: Eorts to document the history, biodiversity, and
environmental benets of university land can reinforce the
perception of the intrinsic value of land (R2), thus reducing
land development. Over time, this perception can solidify into
a paradigm whereby it is assumed that land is intrinsically
valuable. In this case, documentation led to a change in the land
use decision for Section 12.
SCHEMA
Case studies
32
nancial resources. This, in turn, forces University actors
to re-evaluate resource allocation, potentially undermining
capacity for campus sustainability research (Figure 4).
Systems Solutions
An examination of the feedback loops that drive university
land use paradigms suggests that, to sustain an openness
to alternative ways to utilise land, other benets from
sustainable land use must be identied, valued, and
leveraged. Examples of such benets are shown in Figure 6.
1. Publications can improve the University’s reputation.
The Backyard Before You, a Rimba Project publication
on the ecology and biodiversity of the Section 12
conservation project, reinforces a shift in narrative:
from the University as insensitive land developer to the
University as an experimental space for development
of contextualised sustainable development solutions.
Such publications can motivate continued investment
in environmental studies capacity, as can academic
publications that contribute to the University’s key
performance indicators.
2. Reputational benets can also be monetised—for
example, through edutourism initiatives. Recently, the
University of Malaya won the Kuala Lumpur Mayor’s
Edutourism Award. Initiatives like the Rimba Project
and other Living Labs can help drive meaningful and
successful edu-tourism, which in turn can improve
university nances, ability, and willingness to invest in
environmental studies capacity.
3. The environmental and health benets accruing
from university land also improve its reputation
with neighbouring communities and individual
users. Provision of clean, green spaces for recreation
is an increasingly rare asset in the city, and land-
rich institutions like universities can lead the way in
promoting this aspect of urban wellbeing.
Box 2: UM Living Labs and the Rimba Project—Operating Outside Traditional Organisation Structures
The UM Living Labs are a agship initiative jointly managed by the Sustainability Science Research Cluster and the Deputy
Vice-Chancellor (Development) (DVC(D)). They are tasked with enhancing campus sustainability on the ground, dealing
with a range of complex issues from water security and waste management, to biodiversity conservation and sustainable
transport. The Living Labs operate on the interface of research and practice, functioning very much like an “NGO” on
campus. And yet, the Rimba Project’s function as a whistleblower in the Section 12 case study has been a double-edged
sword. Some observers were pleasantly surprised that the DVC(D) was party to the whistleblowing and had empowered
young researchers to make a dierence, taking their ndings seriously; others were a bit suspicious, wondering if this
was some ploy by UM for a softer interface with the community given the involvement of student volunteers. Navigating
multi-stakeholder decision-making scenarios, in conservation especially, is a delicate undertaking.
Figure 4: Perception of the environmental and
health benets of undeveloped space spurs
investment in environmental monitoring capacity,
which in turn generates evidence that strengthens
this paradigm, a reinforcing feedback loop (R3).
However, forgoing income from development to
preserve environmental and health benets limits
university nancial resources, creating a balancing
loop that may constrain investment in monitoring
capacity (B2). Indeed, the same nancial pressures
that spur development of university land threaten
to undermine investment in capacity, causing R3
to spiral downward, eroding the intrinsic value
paradigm.
SCHEMA
Case studies
33
Figure 5: In this campus sustainability model, Living Lab sta work
alongside academics and experts, as well as student volunteers.
Here, a bat researcher from UM’s Institute of Biological Sciences
leads the Rimba Project team in sampling bats from the bungalow
site. This study contributed to a peer-reviewed article on the diet
of urban bats, providing valuable data for conservation decision
making.
Further Reading
1. “Rimba Ilmu Botanical Garden.”
hp://rimba.um.edu.my/
2. “Living labs and co-production: university
campuses as platforms for sustainability science.”
hps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
S1877343515000573
3. “Vacant land in cities could provide important social
and ecological benets.”
hps://www.thenatureofcities.com/2012/08/21/vacant-
land-in-cities-could-provide-important-social-and-
ecological-benets/
4. “Understanding institutions: dierent paradigms,
dierent conclusions.”
hp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
S0080210716308238
5. “Unintentional landscapes.”
hp://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01426397
.2016.1156069
Figure 6: To strengthen the sustainable land use paradigm, benets
of this paradigm must be realised. Reputational benets, shown
in green, can be leveraged to create new causal relationships,
indicated with doed arrows, that create new feedback loops (R4,
R5, and R6), motivating continued investment in environmental
studies capacity by the university and possibly generating
monetary benets.
Reading Causal Loop Diagrams
Relationships between two variables are represented with
arrows. Here, positive relationships (change in X results
in a change in the same direction for Y) are described
with blue arrows and a “+” sign; negative relationships
(change in X results in a change in the opposite direction
for Y) are described with red arrows and a “-” sign.
When two or more variables interact in a loop, the eect
can be reinforcing (acting to amplify change), or balancing
(acting to oppose change and maintain equilibrium).
These loops and their interactions with each other drive
systems behaviour, often in surprising ways.
Positive Negative
Balancing Reinforcing
SCHEMA
Case studies
34
of Environment were classied as polluted in 2015, and a
further 168 were considered slightly polluted. Improving
river management requires eective public engagement.
Local Context
The Pinang River, 3.2 km in length with a 51 km2 catchment
area, ows through the heart of George Town, the capital
city of Penang. It has been severely polluted for over a
decade—at one point, it was even declared dead, as no
aquatic life could be found in it.
Domestic waste from local communities is a major source
of pollution in the Pinang River. In theory, this should
create a balancing feedback loop (B1) that acts to protect
the river (Figure 1). As water quality in the river decreases,
the gap between the desired and actual river water quality
increases. This, along with associated impacts on the
health and wellbeing of local communities, should increase
community participation for protecting the river. However,
low awareness of risks and capacity for waste management
are obstacles to community eorts, as is the challenge of
collective action when upstream communities have lile
incentive to reduce pollution. These variables dampen the
action of this balancing loop, reducing the water quality of
the Pinang River.
Overview
Because rivers are complex socio-ecological systems, river
management can pose signicant challenges. Managers
must account not only for the physical and ecological
characteristics of the riverine environment, but also for the
varying needs and contributions of relevant stakeholders.
Local communities often play a vital role in the sustainability
of river systems. In many developing countries, however,
limited stakeholder engagement in river conservation
is a key challenge for the health of river ecosystems. In
Malaysia, 33 out of 477 rivers monitored by the Department
SUSTAINABLE RIVER
MANAGEMENT:
THE PINANG RIVER
SCHEMA CASE STUDY #6
University Sains Malaysia and Penang Water Watch
Lai Chee Hui and Chan Ngai Weng
The SCHEMA project seeks to improve decision-making
for health and sustainability in Malaysian cities through
the application of systems thinking and place-based
methods. The SCHEMA Case Study Series describes a
set of urban challenges and the actions that have been
taken to address them, highlighting where systems
thinking and place-based perspectives can shed light on
underlying complexity and lead to more eective policies
and interventions.
SCHEMA
Case studies
35
local communities, are responsible for managing the river,
undermining the paradigm of river health as community
responsibility (Figure 3). This creates a reinforcing feedback
loop reducing community participation in river management
and increasing reliance on the government-implemented
technological solutions (R1). Indeed, the amount of rubbish
intercepted from the river increased more than threefold
between 2013 and 2015, a sign of increased waste dumping.
This further impairs water quality, increasing dependency
on and cost of technological solutions.
Technological Solutions
The condition of the Penang river has put pressure on the
state government to remediate the river. Technological
solutions are aractive as they promise a direct means of
addressing the problem (Figure 2). Indeed, over the years,
a variety of technologies have been implemented for the
Pinang river, with limited results. Water quality indicators
have largely remained short of the Class Two goal (i.e., safe
for human contact).
As technological solutions are implemented by government
agencies, largely bypassing river stakeholders, these eorts
reinforce the perception that government agencies, not
Figure 2: Persistently poor river water quality leads to pressure
on authorities to remediate the river. Technological solutions
are a quick and direct way for governing authorities to address
the problem. This creates another balancing loop (B2) for river
restoration.
Figure 3: Reliance on technological solutions shifts the perception
of community members as to who is responsible for protecting the
river, such that community sources of pollution are not addressed,
and may even worsen due to a lack of consequences. Over time,
the paradigm of the river as a responsibility of the community
is undermined, creating a reinforcing feedback loop (R1) that
exacerbates the underlying problem. This causal structure
replicates the system archetype known as “Shifting the Burden,”
where treating the symptoms of a problem removes the motivation
for solving the fundamental conict, and may even exacerbate it
in the long term.
Figure 4: Secondary school quiz competition
Figure 1: The gap between actual and desired river health should
spur aected communities to protect the Pinang River, creating
a balancing loop (B1) that stabilizes river health. Unfortunately,
communities have limited knowledge and tools to tackle river
pollution. This diminishes the ecacy of B1, resulting in poor
health for the Pinang River.
SCHEMA
Case studies
36
Community-Based Approach
Figure 3 suggests that strengthening community capacity
and responsibility is an alternative to technological solutions
for river restoration. A pilot project was undertaken by
Water Watch Penang (WWP), a NGO based in Penang.
The project aimed to increase community participation
by strengthening the perception of river management
as a community responsibility, increasing community
capacity, and creating channels for community-government
partnerships (Figure 5).
During the rst stage of the project, activities focused on
local communities, raising awareness about the Pinang
River and highlighting their role in river conservation.
WWP organised an outdoor learning programme for kids,
a quiz competition for high school students, and a river
clean-up activity that connected young adults with villagers
living along the Pinang River (Box 1), targeting dierent age
groups to increase impact.
The second stage of the project aimed to expand the target
audience and link communities with government bodies.
A social media campaign was carried out, centred around
a short video presentation, to generate awareness and
conversation on the Pinang River in the broader community.
This was followed by a public forum to foster discussions
among politicians, government agencies, community
organisations, and academics, and exchange ideas for
improving the health of the Pinang River.
The WWP project achieved direct contact with 360 people
and connected with a further 40,000 Facebook users. The
one-time nature of these activities may have increased
Box 1: Outreach
Activity Participants
Outdoor Learning Programme 35 children (age 9-12) and 20 parents
Inter-School River Quiz Competition 88 secondary school students (age 13-15)
River Clean-Up Activity 55 young adults (16-23) and ve local villagers
Social Media Campaign 40,000 views, shared by 1,290 Facebook users
Public Forum 130 represntatives from various stakeholder groups
Figure 5: Two sets of interventions were
carried out by Water Watch Penang, shown
in green. Doed arrows show new causal
relationships with key variables driving
the system. Forums and other channels for
community-government communication
were created to enable joint community-
government eorts for river restoration.
These eorts empower communities along
the river, strengthening the paradigm of
the river as a community responsibility and
creating a new reinforcing feedback loop
for community-government cooperation
(R2). Water education programmes target
community aitudes toward the river and
improve the capacity to act.
Figure 6: River clean-up activity at the Pinang River.
SCHEMA
Case studies
37
knowledge and awareness among the engaged participants,
but translating this into long-term, self-sustaining
community action remains a challenge.
Experiences from the project show that the biggest challenge
is not in educating the communities, but in changing long-
standing paradigms to foster collective action. Indeed, while
local communities are aware of their role as a pollution
source to the Pinang River, individual households see
themselves as negligible contributors, or as powerless to
inuence the behaviour of others in their community. This
suggests that the community ability to act collectively needs
to be developed. Sustained engagement with community
stakeholders and governing authorities will be necessary
to develop capacity and partnerships capable of delivering
lasting results.
Further Reading
1. “Save the Sungai Pinang.”
hps://www.facebook.com/USMTV/
videos/1005068889543045/
2. “Water Watch Penang.”
hps://www.facebook.com/waterwatchpenang/
3. “River basin management and community: the Great
Ouse Basin, 1850–present.”
hp://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15715124
.2017.1339355
Figure 7: Speakers share their perspectives on the Pinang River
at a public forum. The event connected representatives from civil
society, academia, local government, and other environmental-
related government agencies.
Box 2: Pinang River Recyclable Solid Waste
Waste Type Percent
Plastic 68
Metals 3
Glass 1
Paper 25
Rubber & Cloth 3
A survey of rubbish collected during a clean-up activity
for the Penang River showed that 89% of dredged items
were recyclable, with plastic being the most common
material type. This suggests that reducing use of plastic
and implementing eective recycling programmes could
be important for cleaning the Pinang River.
Reading Causal Loop Diagrams
Relationships between two variables are represented with
arrows. Here, positive relationships (change in X results
in a change in the same direction for Y) are described
with blue arrows and a “+” sign; negative relationships
(change in X results in a change in the opposite direction
for Y) are described with red arrows and a “-” sign.
When two or more variables interact in a loop, the eect
can be reinforcing (acting to amplify change), or balancing
(acting to oppose change and maintain equilibrium).
These loops and their interactions with each other drive
systems behaviour, often in surprising ways.
Positive Negative
Balancing Reinforcing
SCHEMA
Case studies
38
demand, MMT requires a critical mass of infrastructure
and users (Figure 1). While some cities have succeeded in
designing and implementing walking, biking, and public
transit infrastructure, many others continue to be designed
for and around cars.
Local Context
Rapid economic growth in Malaysia has led to large
Overview
Multi-modal transit (MMT) is increasingly viewed as
an important component of smart- and liveable-city
solutions. MMT aims to provide urban residents with
viable alternatives to automobiles—walking, cycling, public
transit, and more—for everyday transportation needs,
enabling more active and healthier lifestyles. It also ensures
that those without cars have access to places of employment
and to a full range of amenities, contributing to a more
equitable society. To ensure ease of use of and sustain
BIKE SHARING FOR
MULTI-MODAL TRANSIT
SCHEMA CASE STUDY #7
oBike
Aq Azfar and Ian Goh
The SCHEMA project seeks to improve decision-making
for health and sustainability in Malaysian cities through
the application of systems thinking and place-based
methods. The SCHEMA Case Study Series describes a
set of urban challenges and the actions that have been
taken to address them, highlighting where systems
thinking and place-based perspectives can shed light on
underlying complexity and lead to more eective policies
and interventions.
Figure 1: Design for multi-modal transit makes it easier to choose
alternatives to automobiles. This increases the number of users,
in turn generating greater demand for infrastructure to support
multi-modal transit, and creating a reinforcing feedback loop (R1).
Multi-modal transit benets health in various ways, including
through increased physical activity.
SCHEMA
Case studies
39
demand for car-centred design and infrastructure, as local
councils are pressured to supply parking spaces, construct
new roads, and expand existing roads. These choices often
impede the development of MMT, further increasing
preference for driving, and creating a reinforcing feedback
loop (Figure 3, R2). Furthermore, driving and MMT compete
for a limited pool of commuters and government resources.
The dominance of the car-centric paradigm crowds out the
investment required to make MMT possible.
Addressing the Problem
Despite these obstacles, there has been a push to improve
public transit in Malaysian cities, with many public
transport projects and services initiated in recent decades.
Initiatives include expanding the intracity rail transit system
in the Klang Valley, revamping bus networks, and seing
up dedicated bus lanes. These eorts have helped to halt
and reverse the declining modal share of public transit,
which now stands at close to 20%, up from the previous low
of 11%. Nonetheless, major obstacles remain that continue
to limit the use of MMT. One such issue is the rst- and last-
mile problem: the challenge of geing to and from transit
stations.
Public transportation systems remain poorly integrated,
with lile connectivity between many residential areas and
public transport stops. The Land Public Transport Authority
(SPAD) has set a goal of ensuring that 80% of the population
has a public transit stop within 400 m of their residence by
2030. At present, however, feeder bus routes, frequency,
and reliability do not meet many commuters’ needs, and
improving these services is economically challenging and a
lengthy process. For those not within walking distance of
a rail station—that is, most prospective users—this leaves
Park and Ride or Grab and Uber services as the only options
increases in car ownership. In 2017, there were 13.3 million
cars and 12.9 million motorcycles registered in Malaysia,
or 0.74 private vehicles for every Malaysian. This, coupled
with historic under-investment in public transit, reduced
the modal share of public transit from 34% in 1985 to 11% in
2008. Dependency on private motorised transit has created
unwanted side-eects. The World Bank estimates that time
lost, additional expenditures on petrol, and air pollution
from trac congestion in Greater Kuala Lumpur carries an
aggregate economic cost of RM 20 billion per year.
While MMT can alleviate congestion and other costs
associated with private motorised transit, moving away from
the existing car-centric paradigm is very dicult. Successful
MMT systems require appropriate city design. When city
design makes MMT convenient, commuters will switch
from private to public transport, increasing the number of
MMT users. However, high dependency on cars has created
Figure 3: Driving is the predominant transport paradigm in most cities today, with car-centric design creating obstacles for multi-
modal transit (R2). This results in health disbenets including air pollution and trac accidents. The two reinforcing loops (R1 and
R2) form a “Success to the Successful” archetype, in which two options compete for the same resources; the winner gains resources
at the expense of the loser, seing the winner up for further success. Since driving is the dominant paradigm, there is a large demand
for driving infrastructure and resistance to multi-modal design choices that may inconvenience drivers, making it dicult to generate
support for multi-modal transit design.
Figure 2: Trac in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, by Uwe
Schwarzbach is licensed under CC 2.0.
SCHEMA
Case studies
40
for access to the rail system. While these motorised transit
alternatives have a role to play in MMT, they greatly increase
journey costs while still contributing to trac congestion.
Cycling is an underutilised solution to the rst- and last-
mile problem. It can substantially increase the distance
commuters can travel without having to rely on motorised
transit, increasing access to public transit stops. There are,
however, several barriers to uptake of cycling. First, most
commuters cannot simply borrow a bicycle, but must invest
the full cost to experience whether it is a viable option.
Second, bicycle storage facilities may not be available,
especially to those living in high-rise buildings. Third,
bicycle parking facilities at are lacking public transit stops.
Bike sharing (Box 1) can mitigate these barriers and increase
access to MMT, forming synergies with public transit
systems (Figure 5).
Further Systems Issues
There are other obstacles to cycling, especially issues of safety
and of supporting infrastructure (Figure 7). Bike sharing can
increase the number of cyclists, which increases cyclist safety
(Box 2) and generates demand for cycling infrastructure.
Bike sharing companies can also act as advocates, to the
public to encourage cycling and other forms of multi-modal
transit, and to governing authorities, raising the visibility
of cycling issues, and facilitating collective action. Finally,
bike sharing companies can collect cycling data and share
this with relevant authorities. This data can enable beer
Box 1: Bike Sharing
Bike sharing is a service that provides bicycles for short
periods of time, sucient for single trips. With dock
systems, users begin and end their journeys at designated
stations. More recently, dockless bike systems have
developed such that users can leave the rented bikes
at their destination, increasing exibility. Bike sharing
is integrated with smart technology systems that help
users nd and rent bikes through mobile applications.
Bikes are typically equipped with smart locks and global
positioning systems.
Figure 5: The rst/last-mile problem—that is, geing to and from public transit stations—is a major obstacle to use of public transit and
the uptake of the multi-modal transit paradigm. Bike sharing initiatives can help address this issue. By easing the use of multi-modal
transit and encouraging more users, these initiatives can generate customers (R3). Because of expected returns, bike sharing companies
can make the investments necessary to initiate this cycle, which strengthens the R1 loop for multi-modal transit.
Figure 4: Public transit in Kuala Lumpur. ART Mark II train at
Kelana Jaya station by Sirap Bandung is licensed under CC 4.0.
Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas is licensed under CC 3.0.
Figure 6: Bike-sharing as a last-mile option for traveling from a
transit station.
SCHEMA
Case studies
41
infrastructure planning and resource allocation, not only for
cycling, but also for broader transportation needs.
Bike sharing is becoming an integral part of multi-modal
transit, lowering barriers, facilitating advocacy, and
providing data for decision-making. It has many synergies
with existing public transit infrastructure, beneting from
and increasing the user base. Together with other endeavours
to provide transit alternatives, it can strengthen the multi-
modal transit paradigm and facilitate the shift away from
car-centric cities, thus reducing trac congestions and
improving urban sustainability, health, and well-being.
Further Reading
1. “Bicycle sharing and transit: does Capital Bikeshare
aect Metrorail ridership in Washington, D.C.?”
hps://www.researchgate.net/publication/271273828_
Bicycle_Sharing_and_Transit_Does_Capital_
Bikeshare_Aect_Metrorail_Ridership_in_
Washington_DC
2. “The future of transportation.”
hps://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-
transportation/
Reading Causal Loop Diagrams
Relationships between two variables are represented with
arrows. Here, positive relationships (change in X results
in a change in the same direction for Y) are described
with blue arrows and a “+” sign; negative relationships
(change in X results in a change in the opposite direction
for Y) are described with red arrows and a “-” sign.
When two or more variables interact in a loop, the eect
can be reinforcing (acting to amplify change), or balancing
(acting to oppose change and maintain equilibrium).
These loops and their interactions with each other drive
systems behaviour, often in surprising ways.
Positive Negative
Balancing Reinforcing
Figure 7: Bike sharing initiatives can
make additional contributions to the R1
multi-modal transit loop. These groups
can act as a concerted voice for cyclists,
advocating for cycling and other forms of
multi-modal infrastructure (R3b). They
can also encourage cycling though direct
advocacy and by providing users feedback
on carbon emissions saved and calories
burned, changing users’ perceptions of
transit and encouraging cycling behaviour
(R3c). Finally, by collecting data on
users’ cycling routes and preferences, bike
sharing initiatives can provide data that
improves local authorities’ capacity to plan
for multi-modal transit (R3d).
Box 2: Safety in Numbers
The safety of cyclists from motorised vehicles improves
with increasing number of cyclists, as drivers become
more aware of cyclists and their needs. This leads to a
change in driver behaviour over time. Furthermore,
as the number of cyclists increase, planners are more
likely to consider cyclist safety in trac planning,
through integration of bicycle lanes and beer design of
intersections to accommodate both cyclists and cars. As
cyclist safety improves, more people are likely to cycle.
Ensuring the safety of early adopters is important for
developing a critical mass of cyclists.
42
SCHEMA
The SCHEMA Case Studies are brief explorations of
challenges in urban health and wellbeing. These stories
are situated in and have features unique to the Malaysian
context, yet reect experiences shared by urban dwellers
around the world.
Health extends far beyond medical care. Healthy cities are
planned, built, and run in ways that support and promote
healthy living. Healthy societies have values and set
priorities that create healthy cities.
Health results from the dynamics of socio-ecological
systems. The network of relationships that govern these
systems—and health—are not always easy to see. Until
we recognise them, however, we are unable to eectively
address health challenges.
In these case studies, systems thinking and place-based
methods are introduced as tools for understanding a set of
problems related to urban health and wellbeing.
Systems Thinking and Place-Based Methods
for Healthier Malaysian Cities